I didn't see anything in the article that stated the employees were paid overinflated salaries or health benefits. I could have missed that. I have never been sure why government employees should live as paupers just because they are paid with taxpayer dollars. Besides, it is the politicians that in many cases allowed the employees to unionize, allowed the unions to negotiate just about everything and then agreed to the pay and benefits.
I'd love to see what that town spent all the money on. I assume they had some revenue. I wonder what pet projects, well-meaning programs and non essential services did they borrow money to fund while breaking their promise to their retirees. Right, wrong or indifferent, the politicians made a promise to those people and not keeping it is inexcusable. I have sympathy for the bond holders, but a lot of those pensioners probably have little or nothing to fall back on.
If you want to know the details of the disaster of Central Falls. It is spelled out it pretty amazing detail in the state appointed receivers report right
here.
It is tempting to blame this on politicians but as best I can tell the only politicians were a full time Mayor and handful of part time city council members. Many of whom I think were/are city workers. I haven't read the whole report but read enough to realize that much of the downfall of Central Falls is due to featherbedding by city workers and a way to generous pension plan which allowed city worker to retire at 50-65% after 20 or 25 years of service while only contributing 7% of their pay (and less in earlier years). While it is true that current pension were relatively modest 30K or so, the average income for the town is only 22K with many residents living below the poverty line.
The town had 19,000 resident in roughly 6,700 households the total area for the town is tiny 1.3 square miles so the place is primarily multiplexes and apartments. Looking at the police department is instructive as example of feather bedding. In a department of roughly 40 cops, they had 1 chief, a Major, a Captain, 6 Lieutenants, 6 Sargents. This seems top heavy to me but more importantly they failed to do a good job making the city safe with crime rates significantly above the State or Federal level. Certainly their staffing level would support having a cop every few blocks.
The union instituted a number of work rules and staffing requirements that drove up the cost to the city.
However, ultimately the what killed the city was the pension, since there were more retirees than workers. The report said that the city would be required to allocate 5 years of revenue while providing NO SERVICES (trash, cops, firefighters, inspectors etc) to fund the unfunded liability. Just paying the actuarial required payment to keep current would require an increase of 50% in property tax (they were already raised 25% and the tax per assessed valuation was almost double due to falling property values). To put another way paying the pension would require collecting 7% of all of the median income earned in the city.
It is worth noting that state took over the failing school system 20 years and over the last 20 years has providing more than $600 million or $31,000/resident in funding. If Central Falls was paying for their kids education (instead of the other residents of Rhode Island) the situation would be far worse.
Central Falls is worse than most places but I fear it the proverbial canary in the coal mine.
. Besides with the debt ceiling and budget crisis solved it was time to move on...
